EGER JOURNAL OF
AMERICAN STUDIES
VOLUME XII/1–2 2010
EDITOR: LEHEL VADON
DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES ESZTERHÁZY KÁROLY COLLEGE
EGER
GUEST EDITORS TIBOR GLANT ZSOLT VIRÁGOS
ISSN 1786-2337 HU ISSN 1786-2337
COPYRIGHT © BY EJAS All rights reserved
A kiadásért felelős
az Eszterházy Károly Főiskola rektora Megjelent az EKF Lìceum Kiadó gondozásában
Igazgató: Kis-Tóth Lajos Felelős szerkesztő: Zimányi Árpád Műszaki szerkesztő: Nagy Sándorné
CONTENTS
______________________________________________________ EJAS CONTENTS
Lehel Vadon
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: The Man, Teacher, Scholar, and Manager of
Higher Education... 11 Lehel Vadon
Zoltán Abádi-Nagy‘s Life and Work in Pictures ... 25 Lehel Vadon
The Publications of Zoltán Abádi-Nagy ... 95 Lehel Vadon
A Bibliography of Writings on Zoltán Abádi-Nagy and His Works ... 123 ESSAYS
Irén Annus
Victorian Motherhood in the Art of Lilly Martin Spencer ... 127 Robert E. Bieder
Johann Georg Kohl Among the Ojibwa Indians of Lake Superior ... 141 Katalin Bíróné-Nagy
The FATHER in Sherman Alexie‘s Reservation Blues ... 151 István Bitskey
The Organization of Travels in Early Modern Hungary ... 169 Enikő Bollobás
At Play, to the Full: On the Subject Performed in Gender Passing (the Case of Mark Twain‘s Is He Dead? and Vladimir Nabokov‘s
Lolita) ... 189 Benjamin Chaffin Brooks
What Makes a Good Life? An Oral Historical Analysis of the United States‘ Economic Model of Schooling in Relation to
Perceived Quality of Life. ... 201
Huba Brüchner
Honoring Professor Zoltán Abádi-Nagy as a Distinguished
Member of the Fulbright Family ... 233 Huba Brückner
Senator J. William Fulbright and His Educational Exchange
Program: The Fulbright Program... 235 Thomas Cooper
Envisioning or Effacing the Other: Different Approaches to
Translation in the English and Hungarian Literary Traditions ... 259 Péter Csató
Faith and Conversation: The Politics and Epistemology of
Religion in Richard Rorty‘s Philosophy ... 285 Tibor Glant
The Myth and History of Woodrow Wilson‘s Fourteen Points in
Hungary ... 301 John Jablonski
Composition, Rhetoric, and the Job of Citizen ... 323 Judit Ágnes Kádár
Fictional In-Betweenness in Deborah Larsen‘s The White (2003) ... 333 Miklós Kontra
Harold B. Allen in Debrecen ... 359 Ágnes Zsófia Kovács
Interior Architecture: The Iconography of Culture and Order in
Edith Wharton‘s Nonfiction ... 367 Zoltán Kövecses
Metaphorical Creativity in Discourse ... 381 Katalin Kürtösi
―… bright young modernists‖ in Canada... 401 Tamás Magyarics
Changes in the U.S. National Security Concepts after the
Cold War ... 411
Éva Mathey
Official America and Hungarian Revisionism between the
World Wars ... 427 Judit Molnár
Looking Back to Colonial Times: Austin Clarke‘s Idiosyncratic
Way of Remembering Places on Barbados ... 447 Lenke Németh
The Power of Art: The Woman Artist in Rachel Crothers‘
He and She and Tina Howe‘s Painting Churches ... 455 Zoltán Peterecz
The Fight for a Yankee over Here: Attempts to Secure an American for an Official League of Nations Post in the Post-War Central European Financial Reconstruction
Era of the 1920s... 465 Zoltán Simon
―Thought there‘d be huckleberries‖: Intertextual Game between Toni Morrison‘s Beloved and Mark Twain‘s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn ... 489 Péter Szaffkó
John Hirsh and the American Theatre ... 499 Edina Szalay
Gothic Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century American
Women‘s Literature... 511 Judit Szathmári
American Indian Humor... 529 András Tarnóc
Ritual and Redemption in the Narrative of Father
Isaac Jogues (1643) ... 543 Zoltán Vajda
Back to the Age of the Borgias? Thomas Jefferson on
Civilization and Affection in the United States ... 557 David L. Vanderwerken
Kurt Vonnegut‘s Slaughterhouse-Five at Forty: Billy Pilgrim—
Even More a Man of Our Times ... 567
Gabriella Varró
Real and Imagined Places in the Plays of Tennessee Williams
and Sam Shepard ... 581 István Kornél Vida
―Sustained by Mr. Jefferson‖: Colonizationism as Jeffersonian
Heritage in Abraham Lincoln‘s Thinking... 593 Zsolt Virágos
Reflections on the Epistemology Of Myth(M1)–and–Literature
Transactions ... 603 Gabriella Vöő
―My boys are more care every year‖: Louisa May Alcott‘s
Notions of Disciplined Masculinity ... 619 BOOK REVIEWS
Máté Gergely Balogh 1956 in the American Mind
(Tibor Glant, Remember Hungary 1956: Essays on the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence in American Memory;
Tibor Glant, Emlékezzünk Magyarországra – 1956: Tanulmányok
a magyar forradalom és szabadságharc amerikai emlékezetéről.) ... 633 András Csillag
Tribute to a Great Scholar of American Studies in Hungary
(Lehel Vadon, To the Memory of Sarolta Kretzoi) ... 640 Mária Kurdi
Exploring an Understudied Area in David Mamet
(Lenke Mária Németh, ―All It is, It‘s a Carnival‖: Reading David
Mamet‘s Women Characters with Bakhtin) ... 645 Mária Kurdi
Collected Tributes to the Memory of László Országh
Lehel Vadon, ed. In Memoriam Országh László. Születésének
100. évfordulójára [On the Centenary of His Birth]) ... 650
Gergely Makláry
One More Tally of Professor Országh‘s Impact and Scholarly Achievement
(Zsolt Virágos, ed. Országh László válogatott írásai [The Selected Writings of László Országh]); Katalin Köbölkuti and Katalin Molnár, (eds.) Országh László emlékezete
[In Honorem László Országh]) ... 655 Zoltán Peterecz
―Comfortable disinterestedness‖: How the United States Looked at Hungary during World War I
Tibor Glant, Kettős tükörben: Magyarország helye az amerikai közvéleményben és külpolitikában az első világháború idején.
[Through a Double Prism: Hungary‘s Place in American
Public Opinion and Diplomacy during World War I]) ... 661 Zoltán Peterecz
Homeless but not Hopeless: Jewish-Hungarians‘ Migration to the United States, 1919–1945
(Tibor Frank, Double Exile. Migrations of Jewish-Hungarian
Professionals through Germany to the United States, 1919–1945) ... 669 Gabriella Varró
A Unique Achievement that Cannot Be Repeated
(Lehel Vadon, Az amerikai irodalom és irodalomtudomány bibliográfiája Magyarországon 2000-ig. [American Literature
and Literary Scholarship in Hungary: A Bibliography to 2000]) ... 676 Balázs Venkovits
A New Approach to the Study of Minstrelsy
(Gabriella Varró, Signifying in Blackface: The Pursuit of
Minstrel Signs in American Literature) ... 683 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ... 689
Harold B. Allen in Debrecen
Miklós Kontra
Zoltán Abádi Nagy certainly knows the name, but it may not be an exaggeration to assume that Harold B. Allen‘s name is probably unknown to most of our colleagues who teach English and American Studies in Hungarian universities today. To those who are as old as I am, his name may sound vaguely familiar. When I first met him as a student in Debrecen in 1972, the second of three English Departments in Hungary had about 120 students taught by about 10 professors. It was easy to know practically everybody in English and American Studies in the country, and the news of remarkable events in the profession spread fast by the grapevine. That Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen played host to the first-ever Fulbright-Hays professor sent to Hungary in 1972 became known overnight by colleagues in Budapest and Szeged, that is, by about the 30 to 40 senior and junior faculty members in the other two universities with English departments. Thirty-eight years later and after the fall of the Iron Curtain there are so many university departments of English and American Studies, with so many colleagues, and such a large number of exchange programs, that a Fulbrighter in Hungary today is quite unremarkable. For the historical record, in what follows I will try to reconstruct Allen‘s two trips to Hungary.
According to the Lexicon Grammaticorum (Linn 1996), Harold Byron Allen (1902–1988) studied American dialects at the University of Michigan under Hans Kurath and structural linguistics under Charles Carpenter Fries. From 1933 to 1939 he was an assistant editor of The Early Modern English Dictionary and from 1939/40 he was an editor of The Middle English Dictionary. He received his M.A. in 1928 and his Ph.D. in 1941, both in English from Michigan. In 1944, he moved to the University of Minnesota where he retired as Professor of English and
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Linguistics in 1971. He taught and consulted at the University of Cairo, University of Tehran, and Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen. Allen is best known for his Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest (1973–76)
―which was the first Atlas to summarize the responses of the informants and to combine the results of mail questionnaires with field interviews.‖
Allen had ―a profound effect on the professional development of linguistics in the U.S.‖ (Linn 1996: 21). He headed four national organizations related to the English language in the U.S.A., namely the Conference on English Composition and Communication, the National Council of Teachers of English, Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), and the American Dialect Society. He was a co- founder of TESOL and served as its first President in 1965.
Volume 23 (1990–1995) of the Journal of English Linguistics was a special issue compiled in memory of Harold B. Allen. I reproduce its contents here to illustrate the breadth of Allen‘s scholarship and the many scholars whose respect he earned.
JEngL Contents
His first trip to Debrecen
In 1972/73 an unprecedented event took place in Debrecen: a Fulbright-Hays professor came to the university to teach a course named Varieties of American English. Before Allen, we only had the privilege to be taught by an English lector, that is a British instructor who taught a few language classes to the 120 students in the department. Now Allen was American, not a Brit, and a linguistics professor, not a lector. He taught us lucky students, and some interested young faculty, our first-ever course in American English, and he delivered a lecture titled ―Can Americans Speak English?‖
He also did something else, the importance of which I came to appreciate only later. In his own way, Harold Allen was an American cultural diplomat. He first became involved in teaching English as a foreign language in Mexico in 1943. After World War II, he served as consultant in several countries abroad, and realized that the British Council was leaving the United States way behind in teaching English as a foreign language abroad. In his paper on teaching English and U.S.
foreign policy, Allen (1978: 59) wrote that ―After the first tentative
beginning in Latin America, the English-teaching activity of the United States increased tremendously in various agencies and departments until it reached a peak just before 1970.‖ On the following page of the paper he adds that ―most of the people directly involved in the teaching [of English abroad] were really dedicated to a cause. They believed that the teaching of English is a definite step toward the kind of international understanding that must be the foundation of world peace. I can say honestly that when I went to Egypt in 1954 and again for a second year in 1958 I was driven by the thought that somehow by helping to prepare teachers and textbooks for that country I was doing my small bit for the cause of peace. […] It is idealism, yes, but idealism with a very practical motivation. […] It is the same idealism that led also to the founding of the TESOL organization itself.‖
Driven by his idealism and taking advantage of détente and his connections, Harold Allen played a key role in bringing about a
―unilateral exchange program‖ between Hungary and the University of Minnesota, ―by which the Hungarian cultural affairs institute and our Department of State have cooperated in sending four Hungarian students and teachers to obtain the M.A. in TESL at the University of Minnesota‖
(Allen 1980: 119). The first two or three recipients of the M.A. in TESL went to Minnesota from Debrecen.
Interlude: TESOL 1979 in Boston
In September 1978 I became Associate Instructor of Hungarian at Indiana University, Bloomington. In February 1979 I went to Boston to attend the Thirteenth Annual TESOL Convention. The convention was huge and I knew nobody there. I knew some people by name: Mary Finocchiaro, Christopher Candlin, W. R. Lee, Wilga Rivers, Pit Corder, and a few others, but didn‘t know anybody in person. No wonder. I might have been (one of) the first Hungarian(s) ever to attend a TESOL Convention. It was an extremely pleasant surprise that I bumped into Harold Allen in the hallway of the Sheraton. We talked a little and he immediately offered whatever help he could. Somewhat later, back in Indiana, I decided I should start a project on the bilingualism of Hungarian-Americans in South Bend, IN. Apart from my determination to embark on this project I had hardly anything. I turned to Allen for help.
He referred me to his former student Mike Linn, who, luckily, was soon
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to come to Indianapolis for the Midwest meeting of the American Dialect Society. I went to meet Mike, and he gave me a great deal of help throughout the years to come. I enjoyed Allen‘s and Linn‘s moral and professional support of the South Bend project from its inception to completion (Kontra 1990).
Allen‘s second trip to Debrecen
In 1983 Harold was 81 years old. His aging Mercedes was approaching death and he wanted to buy a new one, in Germany, right from the factory, because it was cheaper to buy one in Germany and ship it to the U.S. than to buy it in Minnesota. He bought a Turbo Diesel, a magic car nobody had ever seen in Hungary before. The thing about a Turbo Diesel was that it used diesel, but was as fast as a car that ran with gas. Allen was proud of his car and experimented with it to find out its capabilities. When he drove from Budapest to Debrecen in September 1983, on the infamous Highway No. 4, which had only one lane each direction, passing was almost impossible. But Allen had complete confidence that his Turbo Diesel could pass cars that Hungarians could not. I was sitting next to him and Mrs. Allen sat in a back seat.
Somewhere half way between Budapest and Debrecen, Allen felt like passing a truck although another 18-wheeler was coming in the opposite direction. I was breathless, and had I been interviewed by a sociolinguist, I could have given him/her a perfect ―danger of death‖ report. I held on tight, couldn‘t do anything else. At that moment Elisabeth in the back yelled ―Harold Allen!‖ It was then that I learned somebody‘s full name can mean ―Don‘t kill us, crazy bastard!‖ in English.
We made it to Debrecen and on September 16 Allen gave a talk in the university titled ―Sex Variation in Dialect Informant Responses‖. I introduced him as one of the grand old men of American linguistics: a famous dialectologist, who is also an applied linguist, and who isn‘t shy to write an ESL textbook. His Debrecen lecture was a rehearsal of an invited paper at the upcoming Midwest Regional Meeting of the Dialect Society, which was eventually published in three parts (Allen 1985, 1986a, 1986b).
Weeks before we drove to Debrecen, Harold issued invitations to about a dozen people to come to a dinner party in the best restaurant in town, the one in the then famous ―Arany Bika‖ Hotel. Invited were Americanist colleagues from the university, Zoltán Abádi Nagy among them, two colleagues who received their M.A. in TESL from Minnesota, and the best linguistics professor at Debrecen at the time, Ferenc Papp. As can be seen from the photograph here, the waiters of ―Arany Bika‖ were even able to put a little American flag on the table. Harold Allen played host, spoke about American–Hungarian relations, encouraged us to keep up our idealism, and we drank to American Studies and teaching English in Hungary. At 81, he made no secret of this trip being his swan song of a traveler in Europe.
When back in Budapest, I suggested to the Allens a trip to the Danube Bend. They enjoyed the open air museum in Szentendre, the royal palace in Visegrád, and the magnificent cathedral in Esztergom.
Highway No. 11 being even narrower than No. 4, the driving was relatively safe this time, and we even stopped to pose for a picture on the riverside.
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Harold Allen‘s two trips to Debrecen resulted in an arrangement that made it possible for Hungarians from Debrecen and elsewhere to go to study at the University of Minnesota in the 1970s, and he supported my project on Hungarian-American bilingualism, which later prompted other Hungarian linguists to put Hungarian-Americans on the language contact map (see Fenyvesi 2005 for a thorough overview). He was an important player, who deserves to be remembered for his services to American Studies and linguistics in Hungary.
References
Allen, Harold B. 1978. The Teaching of English as a Second Language and U.S. Foreign Policy. In: Blatchford, Charles H. and Jacquelyn Schachter, eds., On TESOL ‗78: EFL Policies, Programs, Practices, 57–71. Washington, D. C.: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
Allen, Harold B. 1980. A Report for the Archives of Linguistics. In:
Davis, Boyd H. and Raymond K. O‘Cain, eds., First Person Singular, 111–120. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V.
Allen, Harold B. 1985. Sex-Linked Variation in the Responses of Dialect Informants: Part 1, Lexicon. Journal of English Linguistics 18: 97–
123.
Allen, Harold B. 1986a. Sex-Linked Variation in the Responses of Dialect Informants: Part 2, Pronunciation. Journal of English Linguistics 19: 4–24.
Allen, Harold B. 1986b. Sex-Linked Variation in the Responses of Dialect Informants: Part 3, Grammar. Journal of English Linguistics 19: 149–176.
Fenyvesi, Anna. 2005. Hungarian in the United States. In: Fenyvesi, Anna, ed., Hungarian Language Contact Outside Hungary: Studies on Hun- garian as a minority language, 265–318. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kontra, Miklós. 1990. Fejezetek a South Bend-i magyar nyelvhaszná- latból (=Chapters on the Hungarian Language as Spoken in South Bend, IN). Budapest: A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia Nyelv- tudományi Intézete.
Linn, Michael D. 1996. Allen, Harold Byron. In: Stammerjohann, Harro (general editor), Lexicon Grammaticorum: Who‘s Who in the History of World Linguistics, 20–21. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Interior Architecture:
The Iconography of Culture and Order in Edith Wharton‘s Nonfiction
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács
Introduction
Edith Wharton is best known as a novelist of manners specializing in life in upper class New York City society around the turn of the 19th–
20th centuries. In this paper I am focusing on work by another Edith Wharton: the author of travel books and a manual on interior design. In particular, I am going to take a look at two early texts of hers, The Decoration of Houses (1897) and Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904).
These two are linked by the intellectual project they perform: showing the American audience the use of European art in everyday life. To put it in general terms, Wharton conveys a sense of cultural order to her American readers through examples of European architecture.
In her The Social Construction of American Realism, Amy Kaplan approaches Wharton‘s early work as an attempt to establish her position as a professional author. Kaplan claims that architecture is the metaphor of writing in Wharton, and both in her early fiction and nonfiction architecture represents the clash between a professional male tradition of writing and female amateur text production. So in her nonfiction, when Wharton discusses architecture, her statements can also be read as comments on her aim to become a professional female author. For instance in The Decoration of Houses, when she is describing architectural principles of interior decoration, she criticizes the concept of the domestic interior as the special space of women separate from male authored spaces of architectural design. So the term interior architecture
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becomes a metaphor for criticizing the inside-outside divide, for thinking about a supposedly female space in supposedly male terms.
In my discussion of Wharton‘s early nonfiction I suggest that the gender oriented reading of these texts limits reflection on their other social aspects. Wharton‘s continual references to historical change, the historiography of art, and national features of cultures situate the gender aspect at the crossroads of other social aspects of culture. Although Wharton seems to set up manuals of interior architecture and garden design, I claim that in fact she lays out historically established principles of taste. She does not hold her arty examples up for copying, but rather for reflection: she offers meditations on the relation of art and everyday life. In her own terms, she reflects on the uses of civilization.
The paper is divided into four sections. The first part explicates the problem of professionalization and cultural work in Wharton‘s contemporary reception as a basis of my argument. The second part surveys of the importance of the metaphor of architecture for Wharton in her early fiction. The third part looks at how The Decoration of Houses relies on the notion of interior architecture while describing European examples of interior order. The fourth part studies how the volume on Italian Villas applies the notion of architecture for the space outside the house: the garden. The conclusion formulates the function of the nonfiction texts in more general terms than that of the professional female author. It explicates the approach Wharton performs towards architecture, art history, and cultural change in the texts.
1. The problem: female subversive potential in Wharton‘s texts
During the 1980s Edith Wharton‘s oeuvre was recanonized. The work was performed by scholars who foregrounded female subversive potential in her fiction. As Millicent Bell puts it: ―Though she was no conscious feminist, it was felt that she had expressed her own struggles in fiction that showed her clear understanding of what it had meant to her to be a woman.‖ (Bell 2005, 13) As a result, a multitude of books and articles have been published on the subject. The interest promoted biographical studies showing her life in terms of feminist psychopatology, (Bell 2005, 13) as well as monographs investigating the commodification in the formation of the female artist‘s character (Bell 2005, 14). This image of Wharton also appears in literary overviews: for instance in 1984,
Amy Kaplan in her The Social Construction of American Realism articulated the commodfication of the figure of the female artist in terms of the division between private and public sphere. ―[Wharton‘s] writing is situated at a complex intersection of class and gender. Wharton attempted to construct a separate personality in the mind of the public and to write herself out of the private domestic sphere, (Kaplan 1984, 79) inscribing a public identity in the marketplace, unlike contemporary lady novelists of the domestic sphere like H. B. Stowe and Catherine Sedgwick. (Wright 1997, 5) Wharton‘s achievement in constructing a public identity for herself as a female author was considered to be a significant alteration of the public roles designated for the lady novelist of her time.
It would seem that the body of travel writings could have been included in the description of the construction of Wharton‘s public identity as an author. As we know, by writing American travel books she took upon herself a position formerly filled by American men of letters, a position forbidden for lady novelists. It was exactly through the modification of the public roles of the lady novelist that she was able to write travel books. However, there is one specific problem with her newly forged public identity. Wharton the woman of letters seems an arch conservative in questions of gender and class. In other words she writes nonfiction to preserve the existing cultural and social status quo, so much so that in 1996 Frederick Wegener, the editor of a Wharton‘s uncollected critical writing states that her criticism ―does little to locate a genuinely feminine sensibility in it.‖ (Wegener 1996, 44) Also, Michael E. Nowlin argues along similar lines: ―Wharton boldly set out to claim cultural authority on grounds long exclusively occupied by men … in the public arena …[but] showed no eagerness to challenge the bifurcation of culture along gendered (as well as class) lines.‖ (Nowlin 1998, 446) It seems the female subversive potential in Wharton cannot be readily reconciled with her public identity.
On the basis of this opposition one is tempted to ask whether she was modern or conservative, feminist or not. Yet these questions cut us off from the achievements of her work. It is more useful to look at her output in terms of what it does, not in terms of what it is like. In this sense, as Nancy Bentley puts it, we can look at Wharton‘s work as
―neither culturally subversive nor apologist; rather [let us look at how] it effects a new representation of the sphere of culture itself in order to articulate, circulate, and finally acculturate the shocks of the modern.‖
(Bentley 1995a, 50) So in Italian Villas, the task is not to point out the
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incompatibility of the feminist sensibility and the public identity. Rather, the task is to explicate how the text represents the sphere of culture and how it articulates the shocks of the modern (Bentley 1995b, 5).
2. Architecture as metaphor in Wharton‘s early fiction
Architecture ―remained an important metaphor for writing for Wharton throughout her life,‖ as Amy Kaplan claims. ―For her, the achievement of architectural form in her novels is related to her sense of attaining the status of the professional author‖ (Kaplan 78–79). But how can one attain the status of the professional author? Kaplan maintains that Wharton created for herself the status of the professional female author and rejected the traditional role designated for a female author, the status of the amateur lady novelist. The 19th c lady novelist produces popular, sentimental texts for a domestic female audience. Instead, the professional female author aims at leaving the topics of the domestic sphere and adapting herself to the concerns and methods of professional male authors. To illuminate this dilemma of Wharton‘s, I suggest that we have a look at a section from her 1893 short story titled ―The Fulness of Life‖
and compare the architectural metaphor of writing there to a similar one by Henry James in order to visualize the new problems of the professional author Wharton faces at the beginning of her career.
In her short story, Wharton relies on an architectural metaphor to illuminate the way the female psyche works and is expressed. The frame narrative of the story is quite simple. An intelligent, cultured woman dies and is happy to find herself in Heaven. Upon entry, she is interrogated about her life and relation with her husband, and from the interview it turns out they never had much in common intellectually speaking, as the husband was never able to comprehend the spiritual joys or sorrows of his impressionable wife. At the beginning of the tale, the woman describes her relationship to her husband in architectural terms, and relies on the image I wish to focus on now. As the conversation goes:
―And yet you were fond of your husband?‖ [the Spirit asked.]
―You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple.
But I have sometimes thought that a woman‘s nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the
sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list;
but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.‖
―And your husband,‖ asked the Spirit, after a pause, ―never got beyond the family sitting-room?"
―Never,‖ she returned, impatiently; ―and the worst of it was that he was quite content to remain there. (Wharton 1893, sec. 2)
The description of a woman‘s nature as a house with public and private spaces provides a visual representation of the inaccessibility of the female ‗soul.‘ Even the husband, the prioritized male enters the communal rooms only. It is only the public spaces that are accessible for him: not because the inner chambers are closed but because he feels no need to access them.
This visual metaphor of the female soul by Wharton is strikingly similar to Henry James‘s image of the chamber of the mind the novelist is to represent. As James maintains:
Experience is never limited and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web, of the finest silken threads, suspended in the chamber of consciousness and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations. (James 1984, 52)
For James the chamber of the mind is the site where the process of experience happens. The good novelist is after the representation of this process. According to James, French realist novelists fall off the mark because they fail to enter this chamber, they do not even enter the house (of a person‘s nature).
Let us compare the two images of the ‗soul‘ and its accessability, Wharton‘s version of the room of the soul and James‘s chamber of the mind. The main structures of the houses, their architectural designs are identical. In the center one finds the room of the soul, the most important and most private space of the building. For James, the room is accessible, but only for those applying the right means: for novelists interested in psychological introspection and not in empirical sensory details of human life. In other words, access is provided for psychological novelists and not for realist authors. For Wharton, the same question of accessibility is
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posed along gender lines. In her version it is specifically the female soul that awaits its male visitor. Also, the male visitor never gets access to the precious chamber. So for Wharton it is the prioritized male who fails to enter the room of the female soul, the analogue of the realist novelist in James.
Let us go a step further and read Wharton‘s architectural metaphor as a metaphor of writing similar to James‘s, as Kaplan also suggested.
The main concern being the expression of the life of the female soul, it is indicated its space can never be explored by a male visitor. If we read the room-visitor duality in terms of James‘s code, i. e. as a subject matter and novelist duality, then Wharton‘s image poses a concern about the novelistic methods that are needed for an exploration of the female soul in a novel. The male novelist and his methods do not suffice in conveying the contents of the female soul, at least not by the realist method. But would Wharton accept a psychologizing novelist, James‘s ideal, as fit for entry?
If we go on reading the story, we get an ambiguous answer, a yes, no, maybe so. In Heaven, the woman does find a male partner who is able to comprehend her thoughts and emotions, yet she decides not to go for him but to wait for her husband to accompany her in eternity. So yes, there are ways to express the female soul. Yet the female soul does not want to be expressed and reverts to its original isolated position. How are we to take this ambiguity? Why does the woman prefer her isolated condition to one of communication and partnership?
At this point we can return to the question of professional authorship Wharton‘s architectural metaphors are supposed to be linked to. It is the woman who, despite former claims, prevents the male visitor from entering the room of her soul. The idea of women‘s sphere as separate, linked to the domestic interior of the house is the one problematized here. Is women‘s sphere really separate from men‘s, or is this separation being kept up by women authors themselves? The ironic ending of the short story would suggest the artificiality of the divide and also a criticism of the intelligent lady novelist who keeps up the division by intentionally not sharing her experience with male partners. A professional female author is unlike the lady novelist, as her main concern is to allow communication between the male and female spheres, even at the cost of the loss of the idea of a separate female sphere. So for Wharton the metaphor of architecture is connected to her aim to create the position
of the professional author at the crossroads of former male and female traditions of writing.
3. Interior Architecture: Architecture and interior decoration in The Decoration of Houses
The theme of architecture is the main concern of Wharton‘s nonfiction texts, too. In the next sections, let us have a look at how she involves the concept of architecture into her texts on interior decoration and gardening.
The Decoration of Houses starts out with professing the architectural principle underlying the field of interior decoration. As Wharton starts out ―Rooms may be decorated in two ways: by a superficial application of ornament totally independent of structure, or by means of those architectural features which are part of the organism of every house, inside as well as out.‖ (1) The contrast between decoration as superficial ornament versus decoration as structural element has come into being as late as the 19th century, when a division of labor between the work of the architect and the work of the decorator took place.
Wharton professes that the art of interior decoration is comprehended only if one thinks of interior decoration as it was conceived of until the 19th century, as a branch of architecture (2), or as house architecture (140). So the keyword to interior decoration is architectural treatment in all areas.
Yet what does an architectural treatment mean in practice, for the areas covered in the different chapters? The book has dull-sounding chapters like: walls, doors, windows, fireplaces, ceilings and floors, hall and stairs, different kinds of rooms (gala, morning, library, dining, bed, school), bric à brac. Perhaps it is easier to see how the placement and size of doors, windows, and fireplaces should depend on architectural proportion, simplicity, and the needs of the inmates. Yet how, Wharton asks, does one find the link between these principles and the decoration of bedroom carpets? She finds the answer stating that ―in the composition of the whole there is no negligible entity‖ (192), as in all areas the supreme excellence is simplicity, harmony, and proportion.
Wharton bases her positive belief in the architectural treatment on two presuppositions: first, on her belief in the reliability of the historical method and second, on her belief in an innate sense of beauty. First, she
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maintains that an understanding of the historically changing functions of rooms is needed for the application of the right decoration. In her explanations she continually refers to the fact that the present vulgar American style of interior decoration shows deficiencies mainly because it does not understand the proper functions of the rooms and the decorations. It is a historical knowledge of changes of functions in the English middle-class house or in the aristocratic town residence that is needed not to mix functions when planning today. For instance, the gala rooms are not separate from the private apartments in American homes.
The historical reason for this is that the American house is the enlargement of the maison bourgeoise and of the English middle class house, not the aristocratic county seat or the town residence, where gala rooms had been necessary and a different planning was needed. In Italian Renaissance palaces the private apartment called ‗mezzanin‘ was placed in a separate portion of the palace, an intermediate story that was formed by building some very high studded salons and of lowering the ceiling of adjoining rooms, thus creating intermediate rooms. (7) In fact, due to changes of lifestyles, the architectural decoration of the renaissance private apartment is of more interest to decorators today than the enormous public spaces of the same palaces.
As the second presupposition of her belief in the architectural method, she accepts the existence an innate sense of beauty. For her, it is a vital part of life like other civic virtues. Her idea is that one has a feeling for beauty that awakens in childhood already. This sense can be cultivated
—the schoolroom of a child should provide an environment that develops this sense of beauty. Cultivation here means the development of those habits of observation and comparison that are the base of all sound judgements. (175) With the study of art we learn to observe and compare, aesthetic criteria that are elements of culture and make art a factor of civilization. From this perspective the habit of regarding art as a thing apart from life is fatal to the development of taste, and indirectly, to civilization.
In sum, The Decoration criticizes the opposition between spaces inside and outside the house, and also points out the historical changes of the architectural functions linking them. Wharton finds a basis contra historical change in an innate human sense for beauty, observation and reflection.
4. Exterior architecture: The architecture of the garden in Italian Villas and their Gardens
In Italian Villas, architecture appears as the larger rule behind Italian garden magic invisible for the everyday American perceiver. A harmony of design is based on the rule that the garden must be studied in relation to the house, and both in relation to the landscape. (6) For Wharton, the garden is in effect a prolongation of the house with its own logical functional divisions. It is related to the landscape in its orientation, and in using the natural building materials and plants of the region.
Wharton again works with an opposition when she formulates the architectural principle for garden-art. She contrasts the architecturally designed Renaissance or Baroque Italian garden to the English garden of the landscapist school that wishes to blend the garden with the landscape.
Historically, the landscape school is responsible for the alteration of several Italian Renaissance gardens into English parks from the mid-18th century on, in essence for a national forgetfulness about functions of the garden space even in Italy since the 18th century.
Armed with this quasi structuralist intention of locating the deep structure of Italian garden magic, Wharton the scientist also lists the basic units necessary for the transformational laws she has identified. There are three basic materials the Italian gardener uses to achieve his goals:
marble, water, and perennial verdure because these are the materials the climate/location offers. The garden of the Italian villa consists of the following elements: shady walks, sunny bowling greens, parterres, (rose arbour) orchards, woodland shade, terraces, sheltered flower and/or herb garden, waterworks. Enlisting the ingredients, Wharton is on the lookout for the architectural principle in every villa-garden-landscape relation she presents. She mentions the position of the villa on the property, she identifies the separate functional parts of the garden and their relations to the house, respectively.
Let me give you a delicious example of what exactly all these elements are and of how they can be harmoniously placed according to the three rules above. The case in point is the Villa Gamberaia, 10 miles from Florence, with the main lines of a small but perfect Renaissance garden from the 16th century. The house is situated on a slope overlooking valley of the Arno and the village, and Florence can also be seen at a distance. In front of the façade of the house there is a grassy terrace bounded by a low wall which overhangs the vineyards and the
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fields. To the two sides of the villa there are two balustrades, one leading to the chapel, the other to an oblong garden with a pond and symmetrical parterres. Behind the villa, running parallel with it, is a long grass alley or bowling green flanked for part of its length by a retaining wall set with statues and for the remainder by high hedges, closing it off from the oblong garden. The alley is closed on one end by a grotto, a fountain. At the opposite end (behind the oblong garden) it terminates in a balustrade whence one looks down on the Arno. The retaining wall of the bowling green sustains a terrace planted with cypress and ilex and on the other end a lemon house with a small garden. The wall is broken opposite the entrance of the house and a gate leads to a small garden with grotto. Two flights of stairs lead up to the terrace from here. In Wharton‘s admiring commentary:
The plan of the Gamberaia has been described thus in detail because it combines in an astonishingly small space,…, almost every typical excellence of the old Italian garden: free circulation of sunlight and air about the house; abundance of water; easy access to dense shade;
sheltered walks with different points of view; variety of effect produced by the skilful use of different levels; and, finally, breadth and simplicity of composition. (46)
Wharton‘s task as a guide is most challenging when she visits run down gardens that look like enchanted forests for the innocent eye. She herself can only identify the parts by relying on her foreknowledge of typical functions, ingredients, and plants used.
In her analysis, Wharton again manifests her belief in the value of historical knowledge of changes of functions in garden space. It is not only that she criticizes the way the landscapist school blots out former traditions of garden design, making geometric lines seem ugly for visitors. She also wishes to acquaint her readers with subsequent styles of art history from Gothic through Renaissance and Baroque, contrasting these to Romanticism. She leads her readers through seven regions of Italy: regions around Florence, Siena, Rome, Rome itself, Geneva, Milan, and Venice, but these can in fact be seen as two tours, one a tour of mainly Renaissance architecture (chapters 1–4) and one a tour of mainly Baroque architecture (chapters 5–7).
Also, she provides commentary on the historiography of art. She often mentions the way other guidebooks comment on the given site, and locates the reasons for preference or dislike. A case in point is the reception of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore in Lombardy. Baroque
travelers admired its geometry and artifice. Yet in the mid 18th century a counterreaction set in: visitors with a taste for the artificial naturalism of the English landscape school found the frank artificiality of Isola Bella frightening. Commenting on the different judgments, Wharton states that these two preferences are still present in discussions of art, although it would be more useful to reflect on the artificiality of artistic conventions themselves instead of taking sides. ―The time has come, however, when it is recognized that both these manners are manners, one as artificial as the other, and each to be judged … by its own aesthetic merit.‖ (205) To my mind, this view allows for the existence of simultaneous but possibly incompatible manners or styles of art.
Apart from the need to reflect on historical discontinuity and the artificiality of styles, there is also a third aspect to be regarded by the art- historian, the aspect of race. In an aside Wharton characterizes Italian architecture as somewhat out of step with classicism in European art and reverting to medieval images.
This Italian reversion to the grotesque, at a time when it was losing fascination for the Northern races, might form the subject of an interesting study of race aesthetics. When the coarse and sombre fancy of mediaeval Europe found expression in grinning gargoyles and baleful or buffoonish images, Italian art held serenely to the beautiful…, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the classical graces had taken possession of Northern Europe, the chimerical animals… reappeared in the queer fauna of Italian grottoes and … garden-walk(s). (234, emphasis mine)
In other words in the formation and appearance of art traditions or manners seem to be influenced by racial characteristics, too. To read this along with the previous considerations of the meta-historian, diverse races come with diverse histories of art each to be understood as a sign system in itself, possibly incompatible with each other.
In sum, Italian Villas manifests an interest in the architectural principles of garden design with an eye to the relation of inside and outside, house and space, but at the same time also stresses that one acknowledges the historicity of garden constructs and the artificiality or constructedness of artistic manners, and realizes the role of national (as she puts it: race) characteristics in the appearance of artistic manners.
Conclusion: Wharton‘s approach to culture and history in her early nonfiction work
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Having looked at the role of architecture in Wharton‘s early short story, in her work on interior decoration, and on Italian garden design, let us consider the differences in its use. In the short story the opposition of the male exterior and female interior space was criticized and the chance of revealing the inner space of the soul with the psychologizing, already existing male method was opened for the professional female novelist. In The Decoration, the importance of the architectural method in the design of decorations, the mixing of the difference between inside and outside was stressed, but at the same time the historical changes of spatial functions was pointed out, balanced by a belief in man‘s innate sense of beauty as part of everyday life. In Italian Villas, exterior architecture of the garden space was in focus, a criticism of the opposition between inside and out in that outer spaces were shown to have their roomlike functions and proportions. At the same time, the importance of a historical knowledge of changing functions was joined by a new awareness of the artificiality, the constructedness of artistic manners. So the initial deconstruction of the opposition between inside and outside in the short story was first amended by an awareness of the historically changing relation between inside and outside, yet all this was treated as the manifestation of a an innate sense of beauty in man in general.
Eventually, this belief in an innate sense of beauty disappeared in Italian Villas to be replaced by manners and race, a culturally constructed basis for historical change.
In view of this, I think we indeed need to extend Kaplan‘s gender oriented approach to architecture in Wharton‘s early work. Architecture bridges the divide between inside and outside, private and public, female and male spaces, and can be a metaphor of professional female writing.
Yet, Wharton‘s awareness of the historicity of the inside-outside relation and her eventual reflection on the cultural construction of artistic manners indicates that Wharton the cultural critic uses architecture as a metaphor of cultural construction, in her words, of civilization. Eventually reflecting on how this articulates the shock of the modern, one can state that between 1894 and 1905 her theoretical frame of reference changed so much that by Italian Villas she could reflect on the cultural construction of artistic manners, an idea that was probably deeply at war with her innate belief in an innate human sense of beauty she discussed in The Decoration.
Works Cited
Bell, Millicent. ―Introduction‖ In The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 1–19.
Bentley, Nancy. 1995a. ―Hunting for the Real: Edith Wharton and the Science of Manners‖ In The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 47–67.
—–. 1995b. The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
James, Henry. 1984. ―The Art of Fiction‖ In Leon Edel and Mark Wilson, eds. Henry James: Literary Criticism. vol. 1. New York: The Library of America. (1884) 45–65.
Kaplan, Amy. 1984. The Social Construction of American Realism.
Chicago: CUP.
Nowlin, Michael E. 1998. ―Edith Wharton as critic, traveler, and war hero‖ Studies in the Novel 30:3, 444–451.
Wharton, Edith. ―The Fulness of Life‖ Access: July 9, 2008 Available:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/books/fulnessoflife.htm
—–. & Ogden Codman, Jr. 1998. (1894) The Decoration of Houses. New York: The Classical America Edition, Norton C Company.
—–. Italian Villas and Their Gardens. 1976. (1904) New York: Da Capo Press.
Wegener, Frederick, ed. and introd. 1996. Edith Wharton: Uncollected Critical Writings. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Wright, Susan Bird. 1997. Edith Wharton‘s Travel Writing. New York:
St. Martin‘s Press.
Metaphorical Creativity in Discourse
1Zoltán Kövecses
On the ―standard‖ view of conceptual metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kövecses, 2002), metaphorical creativity arises from the cognitive processes of extending, elaboration, questioning, and combining conceptual content in the source domain (Lakoff and Turner, 1989). I will propose that such cases constitute only a part of metaphorical creativity.
An equally important and common set of cases is comprised by what I call ―context-induced‖ metaphors. I will discuss five types of these:
metaphors induced by (1) the immediate linguistic context itself, (2) what we know about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) the physical setting, (4) the social setting, and (5) the immediate cultural context. Such metaphors have not been systematically investigated so far, though they seem to form a large part of our metaphorical creativity.
One of the criticisms of conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) is that it conceives of metaphors as highly conventional static conceptual structures (the correspondences, or mappings, between a source and a target domain). It would follow from this that such conceptual structures manifest themselves in the form of highly conventional metaphorical linguistic expressions (like the metaphorical meanings in a dictionary) based on such mappings. If correct, this view does not easily lend itself to an account of metaphorical creativity. Clearly, we often come across novel metaphorical expressions in real discourse. If all there is to
1 I want to thank the Institute of Advanced Study and Van Mildert College, Durham University, for their generous support in the preparation of this paper and the wonderful academic, social, and personal environment they provided for three months.
My special thanks go to Andreas Musolff and David Cowling for the wonderful time we spent on studying metaphors.
I also thank Reka Benczes, my colleague back home, for her help with this paper.
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metaphor is static conceptual structures matched by highly conventional linguistic expressions, it would seem that CMT runs into difficulty in accounting for the many unconventional and novel expressions we find in discourse. I will discuss various types of metaphorical creativity in this section.
The paper will examine the interrelations among metaphor, discourse, and metaphorical creativity. I will propose that (1) metaphorical creativity in discourse can involve several distinct cases, (2) conceptualizers rely on a number of contextual factors when they use novel metaphors in discourse.
Metaphorical creativity in discourse
Metaphorical creativity in discourse can involve a variety of distinct forms. In my Metaphor in Culture (2005), I distinguished two types:
creativity that is based on the source domain and creativity that is based on the target. ―Source-related‖ creativity can be of two kinds: ―source- internal‖ and ―source-external‖ creativity. Source-internal creativity involves cases that Lakoff and Turner (1989) describe as elaboration and extending, where unused source-internal conceptual materials are utilized to comprehend the target. ―Source-external‖ cases of creativity operate with what I called the ―range of the target,‖ in which a particular target domain receives new, additional source domains in its conceptualization (Kövecses, 2005). The type of creativity in discourse that is based on the target was also described by Kövecses (2005). In it, a particular target that is conventionally associated with a source ―connects back‖ to the source taking further knowledge structures from it. We can call this ―target- induced‖ creativity.
In the remainder of the paper, I will suggest that there is yet another form of metaphorical creativity in discourse—creativity that is induced by the context in which metaphorical conceptualization takes place. This kind of creativity has not been systematically explored in the cognitive linguistic literature on metaphor.
I will term the creativity that is based on the context of metaphorical conceptualization ―context-induced‖ creativity. This occurs where the emergence of a particular metaphorical expression is due to the influence of some aspect of discourse. In particular, five such contextual aspects, or factors, seem to produce unconventional and novel metaphors: (1) the
immediate linguistic context itself, (2) what we know about the major entities participating in the discourse, (3) physical setting, (4) social setting, and (5) the immediate cultural context. There are surely others, but I will limit myself to the discussion of these five.
The effect of the linguistic context on metaphor use
Let us provisionally think of discourse as being composed of a series of concepts organized in a particular way. The concepts that participate in discourse may give rise to either conventional or unconventional and novel linguistic metaphors. I propose that metaphorical expressions can be selected because of the influence of the immediate linguistic context, that is, the concepts that surround the conceptual slot where we need a word or phrase to express a particular meaning. Jean Aitchison (1987) made an interesting observation that bears on this issue. She noted that in newspaper articles and headlines about (American) football games, the names of the teams may select particular metaphors for defeat and victory. She found such examples as follows in the sports pages of American newspapers: ―Cougars drown Beavers,‖ ―Cowboys corral Buffaloes,‖ ―Air Force torpedoes the Navy,‖ ―Clemson cooks Rice‖
(Aitchison, 1987: 143). Metaphors used in these sentences are selected on the basis of the names of football teams. Since beavers live in water, defeat can be metaphorically viewed as drowning; since cowboys corral cattle, the opponent can be corralled; since navy ships can be torpedoed, the opponent can be torpedoed, too; and since rice can be cooked, the same process can be used to describe the defeat of the opponent. The metaphors in the above sentences indicate that the target domain of
DEFEAT can be variously expressed as drowning, corralling, etc., the choice depending on the concepts (in this case, corresponding to the names of the teams) that make up the utterances in which the metaphor is embedded.
Defeating an opponent is a form of symbolic control, in the same way as the sports activities themselves are symbolic activities. In general, defeating an opponent is conceptualized as physically and/or socially controlling an entity (either animate or inanimate). The high-level, schematic conceptual metaphor DEFEAT IS PHYSICAL AND/OR SOCIAL CONTROL is pervasive in English (and also in other languages);
metaphorical words for this conceptualization abound: beat, upset,
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subdue, knock out, clobber, kill, demolish, conquer, crush, dash, destroy, dust, lick, overcome, overwhelm, ruin, stump, vanquish, thrash, trample, trounce, and literally hundreds of others. The words all indicate some form of physical or social control. The words cook and torpedo from Aitchison‘s examples could be added to this list, although they seem to be somewhat less conventional than the others. Since defeat is conceptualized as physical and social control, it makes sense for the author to use the words cook and torpedo in the conceptual slot in the neighborhood of the concepts RICE and NAVY, respectively. It makes sense because the frame for RICE involves COOKING and the frame for
NAVY can involve the weapon TORPEDO, on the one hand, and because
COOKING and TORPEDOING are ways of physically controlling an entity, on the other.
There is, however, more complication we need to be aware of. In the SPORTS COMPETITION frame, or more specifically, the AMERICAN FOOTBALL frame, there are two opponents, there is an activity on the basis of which the winner is decided, and a resulting relationship between the two opponents: one opponent defeating the other. Given these minimal elements in the frame, we can say that one team defeats another and we can choose a word from the list above to express this meaning. We do this on the basis of the metaphor DEFEAT IS PHYSICAL/SOCIAL CONTROL. However, how do the concepts of RICE and NAVY that are used in the source domain of this metaphor end up in the AMERICAN FOOTBALL
frame? American football teams are not identical to RICE and NAVY; these are concepts that we primarily associate with very different entities, such as plants and the armed forces, respectively. Football teams are not plants and armed forces. Obviously, they enter the frame because they are the names of the two football teams. They enter it on the basis of the metonymy NAME FOR THE INSTITUTION (i.e., NAME OF THE TEAM FOR THE TEAM). This metonymy is crucial in understanding the selection of the particular linguistic expressions for defeat. Without the metonymically introduced names for the teams, it would be much less likely for the author to use the terms cook and torpedo.
The other two words in the set of examples offered by Aitchison, corral and drown, require similar treatment. We should note, however, that corralling and drowning are even less conventional cases of talking about defeat than cook and torpedo are. What nevertheless makes them perfectly understandable and natural in the context is that the frame for
AMERICAN FOOTBALL contains the names Cowboys and Beavers. The
words corral and drown are coherent with these names, on the one hand, and they also fit the DEFEAT IS PHYSICAL/SOCIAL CONTROL metaphor, on the other.
In other words, there seem to be three constraints on the use of such metaphorical expressions in discourse. First, the words used must be consistent with an element of a conceptual frame that occurs in the discourse (such as that for DEFEAT). This would simply ensure that we use literal or metaphorical linguistic expressions for DEFEAT, and not for something else. Second, the linguistic metaphor must be consistent with a high-level, schematic metaphor conventionally used for that element, such as DEFEAT). In the case above, it would be DEFEAT IS PHYSICAL/
SOCIAL CONTROL. Third, the linguistic metaphors chosen on the basis of such metaphors should (probably must would be too strong a word here) be consistent with other more specific elements in the same frame (such as AMERICAN FOOTBALL). Such more specific elements within the
AMERICAN FOOTBALL frame would be the names of the teams.
The effect of knowledge about major entities in the discourse on metaphor use
In other cases, it seems to be our knowledge about the entities participating in the discourse that plays a role in choosing our metaphors in real discourse. Major entities participating in discourse include the speaker (conceptualizer), the hearer (addressee/ conceptualizer), and the entity or process we talk about (topic). I‘ll discuss two such examples, involving the topic and the speaker/ conceptualizer.
To begin, I will reanalyze an example first discussed in Kövecses (2005). The Hungarian daily Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation) carried an article some years ago about some of the political leaders of neighboring countries who were at the time antagonistic to Hungary. One of them, the then Slovak president, Meciar, used to be a boxer. This gave a Hungarian journalist a chance to use the following metaphor that is based on this particular property of the former Slovak president:
A pozsonyi exbokszolóra akkor viszünk be atlanti pontot érő ütést, ha az ilyen helyzetekben megszokott nyugati módra ―öklözünk‖: megvető távolságot tartva. (Hungarian Nation, September 13, 1997)
We deal a blow worth an Atlantic point to the ex-boxer of Bratislava if we box in a western style as customary in these circumstances: keeping an aloof distance. (my translation, ZK)
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Confrontational international politics is commonly conceptualized as war, sports, games, etc. There are many different kinds of war, sports, and games, all of which could potentially be used to talk about confrontational international politics. In all probability, the journalist chose boxing because of his knowledge (shared by many of his readers) about one of the entities that constitute the topic of the discourse.
In using the metaphor CONFRONTATIONAL INTERNATIONAL POLITICS IS BOXING, the author is relying both on some conventional and unconventional mappings. What is common to the war, sports, and games metaphors is, of course, that they all focus on and highlight the notion of winning in relation to the activity to which they apply. This is their shared
―meaning focus‖ (Kövecses, 2000, 2002) and this is that makes up the conventional part of the metaphor. The boxer corresponding to the politician and the blows exchanged corresponding to the political statements made are explicitly present in the discourse in question. In addition, we also assume that both boxers want to win and that the participating politicians want the same (whatever winning means in politics). However, the manner in which the boxers box and politicians argue is not a part of the conventional framework of the metaphor.
―Keeping an aloof distance‖ probably comes into the discourse as a result of the author thinking about the target domain of politics. In the author‘s view, politics regarding Meciar should be conducted in a cool, detached manner. What corresponds to this way of doing politics in boxing is that you box in a way that you keep an aloof distance from your opponent.
The process is then similar to what we have seen above in the discussion of the EUROPEAN HOUSE metaphor.
In the previous case, the metaphor was selected and elaborated as a result of what the conceptualizer knows about the topic. It is also possible to find cases where the selection of a metaphor depends on knowledge that the conceptualizer has about himself or herself. What is especially intriguing about such cases is that the author‘s (conceptualizer‘s) knowledge about him- or herself does not need to be conscious. The next example, taken from my previous work (Kövecses, 2005) but reanalyzed here, demonstrates this possibility. As one would expect, one important source of such cases is the area of therapy or psychological counseling. In a therapeutic context people commonly create novel metaphors as a result of unique and traumatic life experiences. The metaphors that are created under these circumstances need not be consciously formed. The example
